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15 February 2008

SFLC launches legal primer for FOSS projects

The Software Freedom Law Centre has today issued detailed legal guidance on free software/open source ("FOSS"). Aimed at those involved in FOSS projects, the 'Legal Issues Primer' seeks to deal with all key legal issues including:

Whilst written from a US law perspective, much of the guidance will be relevant in other jurisdictions.

Being produced by the SFLC, the guide focusses on SFLC-connected FOSS licences, the main one being GPL.

The trade mark section looks particularly useful. Whilst most discussions of FOSS legal issues have so far focussed on the fine print of the licences, use of brands by the FOSS community is set to become a big issue. At the Open Source Consortium event I attended late last year, one of the calls from the floor was for lawyers to spend their time considering the trade mark issues and their resolution, rather than spending time commenting on FOSS licences. For example:

  • Popularly acclaimed projects such as the Firefox browser tend to lead to the appearance of large numbers of websites and discussion groups dedicated to the project. Whilst this is generally fine, what if a website/group is "anti" the project and spreading negative publicity using the brand?
  • The purpose of some projects is to created FOSS alternatives to commercial software. Calling the project/resulting software a name that incorporates the name of the commercial software isn't a great idea, as it could cause people to think that the FOSS project/software is from the commercial software house.

I recommend that you read the PDF rather than the web-page version; whilst I'm not one to criticise layouts or designs (IMPACT isn't perfect... yet!), the web-page text is right-aligned, making it difficult to read. Still, that's a minor fault in an excellent contribution to the FOSS library of free legal resources.

Posted at 11:08 AM |

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